Benefits of Academic Improv
For Students:
- Extreme Creative Outlet
- Best Exercise for Theatrical and Presentational Skills
- Sharpens Wit
- Enhances Self-Esteem
- Cultivates Listening and Teaming Skills
- FUN!
For Faculty and Family:
- Unique option for extracurricular activity
- Application of positive social values
- Increased revenue with low overhead
- Enhanced variety of performances from theater department
- Enhanced talent pool
Extreme Creative Outlet: Our students are having he time of their lives. When improv students get together, it's something special. They are working together, to create. It feels like magic. It's steeped in adrenaline. It's full of laughter.
Best Exercise for Theatrical and Presentational Skills: There is no better way to sharpen skills like being in the moment; stage presence; timing; poise; projection; character building and arc; script writing; and many more!
Sharpens Wit: It's is life at a million miles an hour! No other medium teaches you the art of comedy and gives you the opportunity to apply it without giving you the crutch of forethought. You're onstage, you're all in, baby!
Enhances Self Esteem: Imagine the reward of working all year with a group of friends, sharing the same challenge: to go onstage with no script and make the audience laugh. Would that make you feel good about yourself if you succeeded? It better, or frankly, there's something wrong with you!
Cultivates Listening and Teaming Skills: No matter how you try and flip it, you cannot be a good listener alone. It takes a team. Sure, sometimes to the audience it seems like improv is about the witty line, but it's actually about the witty response. And responses only happen effectively when the team builds the opportunity.
Fun: To your audience, Improv will feel different than anything they have ever experienced for a variety of reasons. Among them, they will feel the appreciation the team has for each member. It's a club atmosphere. It's downright fun!
Unique option for extracurricular activity: Here is a challenge. Take any other extracurricular activity and list the benefits it provides to participants and compare it to improv. Aside from "muscle mass," improv probably delivers similar enrichment opportunities - if not more - than any other activity we can think of. Regardless what a student is interested in, this extracurricular makes a perfect, easy addition to a school's offering.
Application of positive social values: For helping to build a well adjusted adult, improv has no peer. If students do not learn from their coaches or peers, the audience will be the greatest teacher a performer ever had. Audiences have very little tolerance for negative values onstage. Young adults learn quickly that mores do, in fact, exist.
Increased Revenue with low overhead: Once they have the right coaching, students can rehearse on their own, without the teacher. For the performance, point a few lights, throw some chairs onstage, and go! You've got a packed house and you didn't pay for costumes or scripts.
Enhanced variety of performances from theater department: Some local schools have added up to four performances each year. And each improvisational show is different, special in its own way, and gives parents another opportunity to see their children shine.
Enhanced talent pool: Not only will "theatrical" students get a chance to sharpen their skills, but improv will bring fresh, talented students from every walk of life into the theater department. Suddenly, you have an enriched program, with better performers and more options in auditions!
